Shannan

I’ll open with an observation and you are welcome to steer this particular inquiry/thought anyway you like. The simple wisdom of “Latching” had a chokehold on me. You are presenting something unusual yet prevalent in our lived experience. Your last lines capture it beautifully: “to be surrounded by plenty, / and still starve.” How often we are barraged with painful circumstances and fail to notice the “plenty”. And sometimes it really is because we just can’t afford to or the starvation is so overbearing that to have one more person come up to you and ask you if you’ve been grateful today feels like a kick to the stomach (or makes you want to kick them ha!). Still, this poem feels as though it is encased in a layer of self-love and wistful gratitude. The language is very tangible — the milk or the nipple that is “too thick to latch / or swallow”. And then the comparison with the kitten “suckling her whole / life” — the softness — and yet almost (gross-ness?) of it — is visceral and makes you want to think hard about the story — the koan, if you will — being presented here. And as someone who has in the recent past finished the mystical business of breastfeeding — it is indeed sticky and painful and disgusting and shimmering. Your poem, then, works on two levels. It is the daughter now putting into language her “ravenous” cries. It is also a voice reaching out into the world, reminding us to witness the abundance despite its sometimes swollen, inaccessible nature. 

ARAH

Your observations have landed on the exact pressure points I felt writing “Latching” - I think we are all feeling the strain of the current cost of living right now in addition to a painful laundry list of inequalities and injustices of a system where our basic needs are not met. I am living in a very rural, agricultural region right now and I can’t help but parallel the human experience to that of animals. Are we not, in at least some way, entitled to resources necessary for life, just as a kitten might be entitled to its mother’s milk? Are we not interfering in both human and animal environments to make that access impossible, whether through climate change, social injustice, or other circumstances? Yet my own life is intensely marked by gratitude - I feel incredibly thankful and privileged to be able to write, live, and work in some wonderful communities, and to have the opportunity to read and be read. Sometimes my sense of gratitude gentles the poems, and other times it makes them that much more piercing.

“Latching” was one of the very last poems I added to my first full-length poetry collection - a book for which hunger is a consuming through-line. As a poem, it served as a natural capstone to three years of writing by circling back to my first experience of hunger, a story that was told to me again and again throughout my life. Because it is about both infancy and mortality, I wanted it to hold that softness and grossness within the same breath, to acknowledge that they are, at times, inextricable. I’ve been writing a lot about bodies and injuries lately, trying not to flinch away from the gory details. Anyone who is deeply familiar with bodies, human or animal, can tell you how they are “sticky and painful and disgusting and shimmering” as you so wonderfully described. The grotesque wed with the gorgeous. I can’t tell you how many disgusting or heartbreaking things I’ve encountered in my limited experiences with animal husbandry. And yet here I am, raising kittens again, incubating chicken eggs again. The sterile separation from the rawness of nature does not erase its existence, it only reduces our proximity. I never want to forget that.

Beyond that, and at the risk of becoming stereotypical, I am an oldest daughter and a descendant of immigrants which has contributed to a kind of fierce independence. As a personal exercise this year I have been practicing one of my most hated tasks: asking for what I need. This is at the core of “Latching” as well - the act of requesting, or at the very least acknowledging, what is essential, knowing you may not receive it.

SHANNAN

I loved how this first poem is so definitively first-person and then the next three are daringly, brilliantly second-person. I read your recent prose piece “Chicken Husbandry” over at The Pinch. Firstly, I want to say I like how connected your prose is with your poetry. The self-affirming voice which surges through your poems is on full display in your prose as well. I love how the idea of “voice” goes beyond genre or creative codification. Maybe you have a few thoughts on this also?

ARAH

I find my short prose to be a close relative of my poetry, embracing similar modes of voice and topics of interest. It's when we branch out into the novel or creative nonfiction that my work starts to diverge. My long form fiction takes that fantastic wild edge that is prevalent in poetry and pulls it in a whole new direction. Meanwhile, my work that is rooted in nonfiction tends to be more funny, more absurd, and often introspectively character driven with less concrete form and conclusions - I think the difference is because sometimes it's all you can do to laugh in the face of reality. Across all genres, I'm on a personal quest to take myself less seriously and the work more seriously. Who knows where that will lead?

Shannan

I noticed the way you treat time. Time is very instant for you — especially with the fast-paced melodic nature of your poetic voice — and thus also fluid. It appears, if even for a moment, that everything is happening simultaneously in your narratives. I’m thinking about how you write “Aunt Em’s then-husband kills the first one. In the years that follow, you’ll forget his name. It’s from him you learn the objective is to be quick about it.” You’ve given us three distinct time-space continuums here in practically the same breath. Your poem “Beach” accomplishes something strikingly similar on an apparently smaller scale. You might be writing about sunburn, sure, but you’re also anchoring up the whole ocean and earth’s history with the simplest of images — “whale spine…dirty seeds.” I have a sneaking suspicion that your expertise with this has something to do with the precise way in which you deploy the second-person. You are welcome to elaborate on this in any way or also to totally dismantle my theory!

ARAH

I confess that I am obsessed with the second-person perspective. The “you” voice has this transformative power because it can refer not only to characters, but also to the reader, and even the speaker. One of my mentors Miho Nonaka described my use of the second-person perspective as a “prophetic voice” where, at times, the “you” was instructive, descriptive, or even prognostic, as if foretelling or commanding the events of the writing. I love the simultaneity of poetry, and how it lets me flip deftly between these modes. I can never get enough. 

I’m drawn again and again to how convicting the second person can be. It feels as though the work is speaking so directly through that flexible “you” that when I encounter the second-person in another writer’s work, I sit up straighter, as though I can feel the piece reading me back.

I think one of the reasons I write poetry is because time feels so simultaneous for me. One of the poems in my collection “Fish Eye” describes it: “The present has a way of ballooning/ until the future and fast touch, warping/ at the edges of my vision. This moment: a fish-eye lens…” There’s this kaleidoscopic quality to our memory where the past overlays present, and even future experience, whether those recollections are positive, traumatic, or something else. Family and nature are two of the most recurring themes in my work, partially because they extend in time far behind and ahead of me, into spaces poetry can touch when I cannot.

A novelist — Nicole Mazzarella — told me that the shorter a piece of writing is, the more it has to “imply the larger novel.” While she was referring to flash fiction, I took this to heart in my poetry as well and now I see each poem as a snapshot of a larger extant narrative. Poetry’s brevity, flexibility, and form offer this capacity of scope to zoom in and out of moments, perspectives, voices, and topics. In “Beach,” I get to focus on sand particles and, through the multifaceted nature of the objects found there, imply a range of time, subjects, and concerns. By placing them next to each other, whale bones and microplastics, all ground down to the same scale, we get to observe and decide what is out of place, and when, and why.

SHANNAN

Water is a recurring element throughout your work. Water and earth. I suppose in some way they are inseparable. I’m thinking about how, in “Shells”, “women coaxed the ocean to open up her secrets” and then, in the playful way in which fear is presented in “Thalassophobia”: “the terror of sharks pales once / you’ve heard the heartbeat of the planet’s oldest / song.” These two things are inextricably connected. The urge to coax the ocean, to enter its depths, and the fear of what is to be found there, the suffocation it can create. I am now looping this all the way back to “Latching”. This overbearing “plenty”! There is also an ecological consciousness that is evoked by this circulation, the infinite narrative. I’m wondering — do your poems (and your prose) seek to excavate that space explicitly, or are you writing first from a personal landscape, allowing the language to guide you to its meaning?

ARAH

I grew up (and am currently living) on the Big Island of Hawai’i. Most of my formative years were spent literally surrounded by the ocean in an all-consuming way. The “overbearing plenty” that you so well described is also a central characteristic of life on the islands: ripe fruit rots on the trees, harvest seasons can last all year, the environment feels overflowingly rich, its colors over-saturated. And yet, I’m constantly aware of the exploitative colonial history of the islands, the pressing threats against delicate local ecosystems, and my own invasive role in them. My relationship with my environment is tangled up in playfulness and fear, respect and guilt, familiarity and awe. Obviously, my concerns have bled into my poetry as reflections of my lived experience. My recent work is particularly interested in water since my return to the island - especially its powerful, peaceful, feminine, and destructive qualities - but that wasn’t always the case. My first book orbits fire as a central element and I think water is taking over as I navigate towards my second collection.